CHICO —- The Chico Area Recreation and Park District has not received a legal threat about its board elections, but it still is looking to see if a change from at-large to district-based voting should be pursued after seeing what happened with the city of Chico.

The board met Wednesday after talking about it previously. In the end, CARD and its legal team will look into it further, bringing the issue back in March.

“We’re trying to be diligent,” said Chair Tom Lando after the meeting. “There are two things: What the public wants the district to do, and if there is a desire to go to district elections by the public, the district doubts it could make the 2020 election.”

Lando said there is no doubt the board would be willing to go to district elections, but “we don’t want to pay a demographer twice.”

District boundaries now would be drawn using 10-year-old Census data, rather than the fresh 2020 data that will come following this year’s census collection.

CARD has received information from a special district association that encourages further research, which district attorney Jeff Carter said he would follow up on.

General Manager Ann Willmann said the special district association attorney indicated that even if the district was moving on its own toward district elections, that would not necessarily prevent litigation.

No old data

The board said there was no use in getting old data and then have to redo the districts, as Chico is being forced to do. Lando even suggested the state Legislature might want to step in so that taxpayer dollars aren’t wasted, especially if more and smaller governments are forced into district voting.

CARD is also interested in partnering with the Chico Unified School District, which is moving ahead with public input meetings after adopting a resolution Feb. 19 to transition to districts or “trustee area” elections.

According to the school district’s website, the first public input meeting for the California Voting Rights Act and Trustee Area Voting discussion will occur at 6 p.m. March 4 at the district office.

“There is potential litigation all around us,” Lando said of CARD’s position, with Carter answering, “It’s a matter of time.”

“Tom’s point is well taken. Why use out-of-date information?” Carter said.

Director Michael Worley, who said he’d worked on the census, thought updated population data would be available by 2021.

CARD is a member of the Butte Local Agency Formation Commission, whose chief, Steven Lucas, said there already are a couple of member agencies that fill their boards from a balanced region. Both South Feather Power and Water, and the Paradise Irrigation District have directors seated by district elections.

But Lucas observed in smaller special districts, having elections by designated areas can be detrimental. Either the area is too small to contain a pool of interested candidates and seats remain open, or the same official is elected repeatedly. Equally unfortunate is that seats remain vacant for prolonged periods, and quorums to conduct businesses aren’t met.

Lucas said Wednesday that he didn’t know the reason that the Oroville and Paradise water districts adopted district elections.